BBC - World Service Writer in Residence

How is creative writing possible?

2013-02-01T14:52:14Z

This week I received as a present two textbooks in creative writing from our partners at the Open University, but I must admit that I'm of two minds about the very issue of creative writing.

On the one hand I ask myself why it is that to become a surgeon one needs to perform years and years of study, learning every tool and procedure relating to the human body, but when it comes to the human spirit - which is what a writer or a poet deals with - anyone can become a writer whenever he or she wants, very often without any study?

Anyone can become a writer whenever they want

Shouldn't a person who aims to influence the human spirit be even more learned than the person who deals with the human body? Yet everyone has a free licence to start writing whenever he or she wishes...

But on the other hand I have a deep suspicion that creative writing ultimately defeats its own purpose.

I'll try to explain exactly what I mean. The manuals in creative writing usually set the rules based on previous famous successful books and poems. "Dickens starts his novel with a phrase...", "McEwan sets up the main character in the following manner...", "Frost brings together his poem by..." etc...

However, creative writing starts beyond the stated and already achieved, it starts on top of that, on the shoulders of all those greats.

Its ever expanding quest is for the unknown, unsaid, unsung, unexpressed. In fact all those greats who are usually brought to the herbarium of creative writing textbooks, themselves were the breakers of the rules, traditions and achievements of previous epochs.

A famous Russian poet said: "A great poem is the poem in which the poet metaphorically builds a multi-storey building and all of a sudden throws himself out of the window of the fifth floor". I would only add that with every work that great poet goes higher and higher, throwing himself out of the window of the 6th, 7th, 187th floor... (though I'm aware that the pattern here also defeats my argument).

So how to reconcile these two contradictory theses? I think that with all due allowances, creative writing courses and manuals are useful, but only to a certain extent. In literature, unlike in other areas, one has to know the rules in order to bend, extend, dodge and break them. Now, just like in one of those creative writing course books, let me give you an example of a poem by the Russian poet Innokenty Annensky - which succinctly expresses everything I am trying to say:

Through macrocosm and scintillating orbs
I say the name of one celestial lover...
Not that I have been loving her before,
But that I have been wearied by the others.

And if the doubt exacts a heavy toll,
She is the one I'm begging for true guidance,
Not that she brings more light into the world,
But that with her one'd be content in darkness.

(1901)

Romanticised criminals

2013-01-25T14:28:06Z

The murder last week of "Grandpa Hassan" - the ultimate boss of the Russian criminal underworld - was in the headlines of the Russian press for three days. He was shot dead by a sniper while coming out of a restaurant in the very centre of Moscow and the courtyard where he was killed was widely shown from every possible angle.

That restaurant, according to experts, was his working office where he used to meet other criminals, sorting out different problems, planning new business schemes...

I spent years working behind the windows facing onto this courtyard

Here comes my turn. For three days I was nostalgically watching this courtyard, where I spent nearly 10 years of my life. It used to be the courtyard of the Union of Soviet Writers, where I represented Uzbek literature. The restaurant-cum-office of the criminal boss for all those years used to be the canteen I used every day.

So how did it happen that the most liberal, free-thinking and intellectual place in the whole of Moscow became the Casa Nostra, where murky dealings and contract killings were discussed?

To understand this metamorphosis we have to go right back into the thick of Soviet times. There are theories that the Stalinist regime, which sent millions and millions of the Soviet population to prisons and camps, itself organised the criminal hierarchy in order to run those imprisoned masses.

Later the genie got out of a bottle - those well-organised criminals replicated the structure of the Communist party and covered the entire Soviet Union. So-called "onlookers" were appointed to every Soviet republic, province, district. Just as the Communist Party had its regular congresses, so the criminal world had their "gatherings" every now and then.

In a country where the majority of the population lived double-lives (one in public, to tick all the boxes of communist ideology, and the other in private), it was perversely in the class of criminal outcasts that distorted rules of honour and integrity still meant something. For instance, they were quick to settle scores if you didn't keep your word or failed to repay a debt. "Grandpa Hassan" was one of the field marshals of that world, being the so-called "thief-in-law" - the highest rank in the criminal hierarchy.

That underworld came to the fore in all its might during Perestroika and the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Every thriving business was protected by criminal gangs at that time and it has been widely reported that many of the oligarchs had links with generals in the criminal underworld.

After the fall of the Communist Party only criminals were as well organised as their adversaries, the KGB.

Andrey Illarionov, a Russian expert who used to work as an advisor to the Russian President, recently wrote that after the break-up of the Soviet Union and during the big mess of the 90s, the alliance of those institutions - the KGB, the criminal underworld and the Nomenklatura (an equivalent of Civil Service) - came to power in Russia and still governs it to this day.

I have mentioned the pervasive code of honour and integrity which criminals maintained. Some parts of the Russian media - settling their own scores with the communist past of the country - made heroes out of those thugs, equating their disobedience to the Soviet authorities to a form of dissent. Publications in newspapers, glossy books, film and TV were produced to celebrate that world. The lives of gangsters were romanticised.

But the latest killing shows the way this criminal world operated, operates and will carry on operating.

These were the sad thoughts which occurred to me looking at the picture of the Moscow courtyard that was so dear to me...

A Man was Going Down the Road

2013-01-18T11:27:32Z

Looking back at the festive season I realised that the best present I received was a book.

That book was written by my late friend, the great Georgian writer Otar Chiladze, and is called A Man was Going Down the Road. It is translated by Donald Rayfield - the ultimate connoisseur of Georgian and Russian literature.

This novel is the earliest by Otar Chiladze, written in 1972. I read it years and years ago when it was initially translated into Russian.

As the blurb to the English translation says:

"...this novel is the key to his later work. It begins with the Greek legend of Jason and the golden fleece and the consequences for the obscure kingdom of Colchis after the Greek Jason comes and abducts Medea. But it is also an allegory of the treachery and destruction that ensued when Russia, and then the Soviets, annexed Georgia, as well as Chiladze's interpretation of life as a version of the ancient Anatolian story of Gilgamesh, and a study of Georgian life, domestic and political, in which women and children pay the price for the hero's quests, obsessions and doubts."

I still remember my utter joy when reading this book - as if my mouth was full of Georgian grapes and the taste of the famous Georgian wine, be it Kindzmarauli or Akhasheni, sending my head into a spin...

I had the same sensation - maybe even stronger - while reading the English translation of the book. But this time my dizziness came from the autumnal clarity of the language, from the transparency of the prose flow, from the typographic quality of the book. It is as if the Georgian wine of Otar Chiladze's novel has been matured even further in English barrels. Here's an excerpt from it.

"After the rain the world was shining, laughing in its primordial beauty, showing neither tiredness nor age, ready to begin everything again, to give birth, to create, to kill and destroy. Perhaps it was now, in this one minute, in the conjunction of muddy earth and baking sun, that so many different sorts of seeds sprouted, so many shoots, worms and insects broke through fibres, cocoons and eggs to emerge in the sunlight, where each had room to spread their limbs, to swim, to turn, because just as many were leaving the sunlight, dying, being washed up, rotting, and taking their place in the cycle of death and life, but in a new form, changed by the eternal transformation, coming back to earth after a myriad of years, transfigured when their turn came. But after a myriad of years their duty would be the same: to live and die, to die and live, and so on without end... Each creature must leave behind its likeness, and until it has created that likeness, it may not die, because death counts as rest for it. So on passing over into death, it can wait with its arms folded to be supplied with new vestments and new mask and to be called: 'Arise, your time has come!'"

When I studied biology at university in my youth one of our professors loved to repeat the formula: 'Every phenotype repeats its genotype', which in its simplicity means that species, especially in their embryonic development, go through the evolutionary stages of their biologic race. Sometimes I think that we live through the same process psychologically, i.e. repeating in our biographies to some extent the entire world history: the joyful Greek childhood, the Roman adolescence, the sombre Middle ages, the unexpected Renaissance, the wise Enlightenment, etc...

The last time I met Otar Chiladze it was in the centre of Tbilisi in 2006 at the flat of another great Georgian writer, his brother Tamaz. Otar told me then that he had written a new novel Godori - The Basket - which I promised to read, but never did. Otar Chiladze died in 2009 and ever since I have lived with the guilt of that unfulfilled promise.

Finally, I read it in parallel with the translation of his first novel.

Unlike A Man was Doing Down the Road, it's a bitter novel. In a nutshell it's about the intermarriage of Georgian NKVD killers and intellectuals. At the same time the novel's content is much wider - a discussion taking in the place of Georgia in history, its relationship with Russia ("it was digested by Russia 200 years ago to come out through its rectum"), Georgia's current situation in the world and its future... Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which tells the story of the Buendia family, Chiladze tells the story of the Kashelia family over the last 100 years, in which a son kills his father after he suspects him of sleeping with his wife.

The novel is written as series of streams of consciousness from different characters, but at the same time could be read as a series of confessionals. It gives a multidimensional view of modern Georgia with all its problems, labyrinths and cul-de-sacs.

"We beat our breasts - we are born warriors! Well, every nitty Georgian has a price on the black market - as a detergent, a condom or black pepper ... Add to that total theft, encouraged by the authorities and raised to the rank of the state policy ... " - one of the characters thinks.

Another one repeats: "Georgia has already outlived one life ... The world has changed and has been reshaped a thousand times, just to give us a chance to come once again into the world from the womb of the empire through her rectum; no one in this world will give us the room ... They would rather splash gasoline onto the linen, and set fire as to the bed of the plague ... ".

It's a bitter and honest novel which is relevant to all post-Soviet states searching for a new identity. I hope that one day Donald Rayfield, having brought to English readers Otar Chiladze's first book, will translate his last one too.

A national treasure in exile

2013-01-11T11:49:32Z

This week was a sad one for me. A close friend of our family, the great Uzbek musician Abdurahim Hamidov passed away in the US at the age of 61.

Put simply, he was the best dutar player in the world. He played this piece, Qo'shtor, while was living in Uzbekistan. His skills, his passion, his greatness are there for all to see.

Abdurahim Hamidov made his simple instrument sound like an orchestra

You might be surprised to hear that the dutar has only two silk strings and yet the richness of the music which he plays on this long-necked lute is comparable in my mind to symphonies.

Qo'shtor means double string and it's not just the description of the dutar itself, but in Abdurahim Hamidov's interpretation it turns into two historic traditions of Uzbek music.

On the one hand - literally - it's sophisticated and subtle music that has come down from the courts of Samarkand, Kokand and Bukhara, and on the other hand - once again, literally - it's a nomadic tradition from the vast steppes of Central Asia.

Uzbeks lived at the crossroads of different civilizations and Abdurahim Hamidov shows in this majestic piece both wings of their culture.

My wife, Dr. Razia Sultanova, an ethnomusicologist and specialist on Central Asian music, introduced me to Abdurahim Hamidov's music some 20 years ago, when she was recording him for the CD published in Switzerland.

In one of the interviews she carried out with Abdurahim and one of his masters - the late Fattokhon Mamadaliev - they told a parable in which Socrates created a divine musical instrument which was later called the tanbur, a four-string lute. Plato was quite envious of his teacher and while meditating in the cave recreated the shape of that instrument, but because it was just a shadow of the original, it turned out to be a dutar. Thus, they said, the tanbur is a male instrument and the dutar is its female reflection.

But in the hands of Abdurahim Hamidov, the dutar superseded even the tanbur.

There is another parable that Abdurahim Hamidov and Fattokhon Mamadaliev loved to repeat.

Once a husband brought home two pounds of meat and said to his wife: "This evening we'll have a visitor so please fry this meat!"

While frying the meat the wife tasted one piece, then a second piece and then a third. She so loved the fried meat she finished it off. That evening, when her husband came home with his friend she pointed at the cat, saying that he had eaten the meat.

So the angry husband weighed the cat in front of her and seeing that he weighed two pounds exactly exclaimed: "If this is the meat, where's the cat?!"

The death of Abdurahim Hamidov was doubly sad for me because he died far away from his native country, in exile in the US.

I think that if life in Uzbekistan forced Abdurahim Hamidov - a national treasure - out of the country into exile, where he was doing all kinds of jobs unrelated to music and playing his beloved dutar just occasionally, something must be seriously wrong with Uzbekistan today.

Another prominent cultural figure of Uzbekistan, the poet and politician Muhammad Solih, who also lives in exile once wrote a poem, which I thought could be dedicated to the memory of the great Abdurahim Hamidov.

My feet are chained by the ice of December,
which thaws under the green pine-tree...
While I kneel in front of the white January
the New Year asks me: 'What are your wishes?'

I wish the following: tell your January
to keep still for a moment,
while I write this: tell your February
not to cheat on the spring.

Order to March not to turn snowdrops into dry foliage,
explain to May that we are not bad people,
tell December as soon as you can
not to take away my friends along with itself!

Facebook or chaykhana...

2013-01-04T15:51:13Z

Yesterday I read on Facebook the following fragment about Michelangelo Antonioni (the great Italian cinema director) and Tonino Guerra’s (his great script-writer) visit to Uzbekistan.
In brief it goes as follows:

“We were driving in the Fergana Valley on a road lined with poplars on both sides, along the endless cotton fields... At some point we noticed two old men on the road and they were of such beauty that I thought: God is not single, he has a twin brother.

I offered to stop and pick up the elderly men. We backed up and asked where they were going? ‘There, about ten kilometres’, – one of them replied.

The old men sat in our van. We started the conversation, asking: who they are, how many children do they have? It turned out that one of them had 65, the other 80 grandchildren; both of them were working on the farm of Lenin, etc.

It was mostly curious Tonino Guerra, who asked the questions, the Uzbek host Ali Khamrayev was simultaneously translating. Funny enough, only one of old men answered the questions. The other kept silent. Tonino asked why only one man was answering. Ali did not even translate the question, but stated: ‘Because he is a senior. It is our tradition: only senior speaks, and younger must remain silent’.

- How old is the younger one?
Ali translated the question to the younger one, but the old man still kept silent. Senior one, looking at the younger, said:
- Ninety-eight.

Soon we arrived at the Lenin collective farm and stopped the car to say goodbye to both men.

It was a year when the first Polaroids had just appeared in our country. In Moscow, Bertolucci had given it to Antonioni as a present - ‘Take it with you; it’ll be your visual notebook’. With this camera Michelangelo approached the old men: ‘Can I take your picture as a memory?’ Ali translated it. The senior Uzbek nodded to him. Then again imperiously nodded towards the 98-year-old younger mate. They were standing on a beautiful road with the poplars in the background.

Michelangelo, directing the camera towards them, quickly explained: ‘You are going to see a miracle now!’ – Not a single muscle flinched on their old faces. – Now I click on the button – (he pressed the button) – and here we are… (the picture with the first dark spots came out of the Polaroid) – you see – green poplars, and here you are, both of you…’ - Antonioni handed the photo to the old men. The senior glanced at ‘the miracle’ and then showed it to the younger with no wonder at all.

Puzzled Antonioni took the picture back from the hands of the old man, looked at it as if he was carefully considering it, and then said, ‘Yes, it seems, it’s not quite in focus… Can I do it again?’ Ali translated, and the old man nodded.

Antonioni quickly ran back to the same spot, setting up the shot for a long time, then repeated the same process and the new picture to the old man with the words: ‘Yes, you were right. The previous one wasn’t focused enough. But here you are, this one is perfect in my opinion. This is for you... a souvenir in memory of our meeting’

The senior again looked at the miracle, then showed it to his minor without letting the picture out of his hands, and after a pause emphatically said something in Uzbek. Ali did not translate it. All looked at him waiting for the rendering. ‘Well, Ali, did he say something?’ Ali was silent. In an awkward pause Antonioni asked: ‘What did he say?’ At that moment the senior man gave the picture back to Ali and walked away towards the boundless cotton fields of the Lenin collective farm.
Alex finally translated what the old man said, ‘We don’t need it.’

And there we were: in the silence of the highway, in a remote Uzbek province, amid the magnificent Lombardy poplars stretching to infinity, the great film director Antonioni with a photograph in hand, next to the great screen writer Tonino Guerra, all standing still… Antonioni not believing what had happened broke the silence, turning to Guerra: ‘All our life, Tonino, we are fighting for great art, constantly coming up with something, and here you are - can you imagine? – they don’t need it?! We are in deep s…t!"

It’s a great story as it is, but it also made me think about the nature of social networks, including Facebook. The live dialogue is always if not hierarchical, at least asymmetric, like in the case of those two old Uzbeks, one of whom is ‘older’ than old. I remember not a joke but a real story told by our grannies: once they saw an 80-year-old man crying. ‘Why are you crying?’ – they asked. ‘My father rebuked me!’ – ‘What for?’ – ‘I forgot to say hello to my grandad…’

But in the case of the Facebook everyone is given the podium of that ‘grandad’, subduing all others just for the comments or likes.
Therefore like in the case of the senior Uzbek returning the picture back to the great Antonioni very often one might feel the same feeling towards Facebook : ‘Too much of you! Too much of you!’

Or is it my age speaking through me, installing itself onto that podium?
Maybe I have just missed one of those endless conversations in a chaykhana**?...

(**Chaykhana are teahouses. Central to Uzbek culture, these teahouses are a place for people to meet, socialise and discuss matters of the day whilst drinking tea. They serve the same cultural function as a British pub. Chaykhanas are usually only frequented by men, although women are allowed with an invitation.)

Master and Margarita

2012-12-21T12:01:58Z

In my youth I had a colleague in one of the Soviet institutions where I worked who was a typist. She helped me from time to time with typing my manuscripts. Once she had a
problem.

She was much older than me and used to study by correspondence at the philology department of the university.

Her problem was that she should have written an essay on Gogol and
Bulgakov but she hadn't read the books.

I promised to help her as that was the time when the entire country was reading Bulgakov's rediscovered 'Master and Margarita'. Not only was it promised but I masterfully delivered that inspirational essay.

I loved the theme; both writers were from Ukraine, with a wonderfully skewed view of Russian life and literature. Both extensively used fantasmagory and surrealism in their writings, though the difference was that Gogol had started his writing career with it, whereas Bulgakov came to those elements towards the end of his writing life.

There was another strikingly common moment - Gogol burnt the manuscript of his last novel, just as the Master of Bulgakov had.

But as Bulgakov said: 'manuscripts don't burn'. The last phrase was key for my essay and it played a surreal 'Gogolesque or Bulgakovesque' role in the life of my poor colleague.

One day she came to work in a desperate mood. 'What have you done to me?!' - she exclaimed repeatedly.

'What's the matter?' - I asked her, completely lost.

'Your essay won the first prize and now my tutor is requiring me to continue my research and write a PhD thesis!'

My poor simple colleague!

I recalled this embarrassing incident while watching 'Master and Margarita' at London's Barbican Centre, staged by the 'Complicite' theatre company.

Mikhail Bulgakov shot to fame in the 1930s because of his plays rather than his prose. So it's interesting to see the process of deconstruction of his novel into a play.

A famous Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin defined two schools of Russian prose: that of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevskiy. According to Bakhtin, the first school is a monologic one and the second is based on dialogue.

The school of Tolstoy looks at the world from the point of view of a single author-protagonist, whereas the school of Dostoevskiy grants the right of speech to the characters.

In that sense Bulgakov is a writer of the Dostoevskiy's school. Therefore even his novels, with 'Master and Margarita' in particular, are structured like dramas with several counter-points of views.

'Master and Margarita' is an especially complicated and multi-layered novel with several equally important stories within one narrative: the story of the Devil descending with his team onto Moscow is intertwined with the story of the Master's love to Margarita and the story of Jesus Christ (Ieshua Ga-Nozri) crucified by Pontius Pilate.

The play staged by Simon McBurney greatly exploits that interplay, adding the drama of different platforms to the drama of plots. Acting is intertwined with video, sound interplays with both of those, actors interact with audience, everything swirls like a Russian blizzard or the Moscow hectic after-revolutionary life.

In the interval after the first part (which had lasted nearly two hours) I was thinking - 'What a brilliant production!','But what is left for the second part apart from the Satan's ball?'

I proved to be right on both accounts; the second part was mostly about Devil's ball and the overly long ending. It's understandable: one had to bring every strand of the story to the culminating end: to set up the ball of Satan with the nude Margarita, to crucify Ieshua Ga-Nozri, to get the Master out of the mental house and unite him in the hereafter with Margarita.

Just to keep this serial ending going on, Satan all of a sudden turned out to be the Master - then the very same Satan unexpectedly transformed into Jesus Christ...

All in all it was a wonderful show which I recommended to all of my colleagues as a festive treat.

BBC World Service Thanksgiving service

2012-12-17T12:51:10Z

My most memorable event recently was a service of Thanksgiving for 80 years of the BBC World Service which was held on the auspicious day Wednesday, 12/12/12 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, just to the side of Trafalgar Square in London.

One should mention that the international radio service of the BBC began on 19 December, 1932, and now broadcasts in dozens of languages including English.

The guest list of the service was impressive. The Most Reverend. and Right Honourable. Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, was present there along with Lord Patten of Barnes, the Chairman of the BBC Trust.

The service started by the congregation singing the Hymn 'All People that on Earth do Dwell'. Then representatives from some of the BBC's language services talked about what working for the BBC World Service meant to them.

Irena Taranyuk from the BBC Ukrainian said: "I grew up with the BBC World Service. It was my father's favourite station - he listened to it in Russian, accompanied by the hissing and cracking of Soviet jamming stations. I loved sharing those night-time listening sessions - it was our secret, not to be mentioned to anyone, as it was a punishable offence in the 1970s to listen to 'enemy voices'. When I joined the BBC Ukrainian Service my father cried... It was beyond his and my wildest dreams that his daughter would come to work for the same BBC World Service".

Priyath Liyanage from the BBC Sinhala told of people living thousands of miles away, who had lost everything, without food, without water, not knowing where their beloved ones are, were hiding under a burnt-out tree, hiding from the shells and crossfire - and connecting their transistor radio to a bicycle dynamo, waiting to hear the World Service through crackly short waves...

I was also touched by the story of my colleague Pooneh Ghoddoosi from BBC Persian, who said: "I ask myself every day why I work for the BBC World Service. My job has kept me from going back to my country, Iran, it puts my family there at risk; my parents have been interrogated and intimidated because of me. But every day I choose again to go to work, and I remain thankful for doing what we do, because I think the information we deliver can inspire and enlighten people".

My role was to read a famous parable from St Matthew's Gospel: "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It's no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.

"You are the light of the world. A city build on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp hides it away, but places it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others..." -

These words made me to think about my colleagues at the World Service.

And as if echoing these words Archbishop Dr Rowan Williams closed his sermon with words: "The World Service has not lost its 'saltiness' - the strong taste of honesty and courage. We need it to flavour our national and international life and to freshen our vision. We lose its distinctiveness, compassion and imagination at our peril..."

Mughal India

2012-12-10T18:00:34Z

The exhibition Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire is currently running at the British Library in London. More than 200 manuscripts, objects and paintings are on display, covering the entire period of the Mughal Empire from 1526 until its eventual decline in 1858.

Though the empire, which covered most of the Asian subcontinent, is called the Mughal Empire, in fact the founder of it, Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, was born in Andijan, modern Uzbekistan. Throughout his famous diary Baburnama (written in Chagatai - which is considered to be classical Uzbek) he referred to himself as a Turk.

However, since this great-grandson of Tamerlane the Great was also a descendant of Genghis Khan on his mother's side his empire came to be entered into the history books as the empire of Mughals or Moguls.

The British Library exhibition is mostly about the achievements of that empire: great change, including a centralised government, religious tolerance, new systems of education and a revival of artistic and cultural traditions most famously embodied in the Taj Mahal.

Shah Jahan wrote of the Taj Mahal "The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs / And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes."

But the history of the empire was marked with tragic events too. One of them was the rivalry between two of the sons of Shah Jahan, the man who built the Taj Mahal. They were Dara Shukuh and Aurangzeb.

Dara Shukuh, a Sufi who had translated the Upanishads into Persian, was the elder son of the king, so should have inherited the throne. However, his younger brother, the orthodox Muslim Aurangzeb defeated him in battle, arrested him and executed him. He also imprisoned his own father - Shah Jahan, and his daughter Zeb-un-Nisa.

In my recent novel A Poet and Bin-Laden I tell the story of that fratricide. Here's a chapter showing the humiliation of Dara Shukuh after his defeat.

To this day Aurangzeb could still feel that gaze on him: passionate and suspicious, loving and wary, cruel and repentant, but never betraying itself with a single wrong word, let alone action. Dara Shukuh's story had come to an end and his star had finally set. The same Malik Jivan whom the prince had once saved from execution by trampling by an elephant had seized the prince and his family on a mountain track as they were on their way to Persia. This guileful Pashtu had written to Aurangzeb to say that in his grief after the loss of his beloved wife Nadira-Begim, Dara Shukuh had not even raised his sword. Only Sipehr Shukuh had fought to the end - but what could the prince do against this gang of bandits, Aurangzeb thought disdainfully.

Dara Shukuh and his son had now been brought to Delhi in chains and given into the charge of Nazar-bek. As God was his witness, Aurangzeb would have preferred his brother to flee to Persia, from where there was no return, but now he would have to a find a punishment for Dara Shikuh that would frighten his enemies and inspire his allies. This is what Aurangzeb would do: before gathering the Islamic judges and pronouncing sentence on this heretic and kafir, he would order Dara and Sipehr to be paraded through the whole of Delhi, facing backwards on a dirty elephant. From the Lahore gates through the two largest and most crowded bazaars Chovki Chandni and Saadulla, then past the fort to old Delhi and then finally this route of shame would end at the Hvaspur prison. But parading ahead along this route with his gang of bandits would be that jackal, Malik Jivan, on whom Aurangzeb would confer the title of Bahtiar-khan.

Aurangzeb knew perfectly well what kind of reception the people would give Bahtiar-khan, how the women would pour basins of slops and urine on him from the rooftops and the boys would pelt the gang with rotten eggs and fruit! And he would arrive at the palace for his audience in that state!

But Aurangzeb did not guess how, at the same time, the people in all the quarters of Delhi would sob and weep at the sight of the two princes dressed in rags and chained to the bare back of a she-elephant.

... Under the fierce summer sun Dara Shukuh shuddered on the back of that elephant as it ambled through streets in which he had known such incredible honour and glory. In the bitterness of his shame he did not even raise his eyes from his rusty shackles and only once looked round at the cry of a beggar who exclaimed: "Dara, when you were king, you always threw me a gold coin. Alas, today you have no alms to give me!" What could the prince throw to him do but a tearful glance or a heavy sigh? But he tore off a piece of gold-threaded brocade that was left on his sleeve by chance, and tossed it to the beggar ...

A howl ran round the market of Delhi ...

* * *

Dara Shukuh gazed though the ogeed loopholes of the Hvaspur Fort at the twilight advancing from the east and refused to admit that the dampness of his eyes was not caused by the evening breeze. His son, Sipehr Shukuh was cooking lentil soup in one corner, while his father, who had moved away to the opposite corner, was recalling his life, grain by grain. For some reason he saw a snowy road on which his mother, Mumtaz Mahal had scattered blood-red rose petals, and himself at the age of nine, hugging his six-year-old brother, who was trembling from the cold, and trying to warm the little boy's icy hands with his breath...

Open Central Asia Literary Festival

2012-11-30T14:22:32Z

Last weekend the British Open Central Asia organisation ran a literary festival in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

They invited writers and publishers not just from Central Asia, but from all over the world.

Kyrgyz and Kazakh, Uzbek and Russian, Azeri and Polish, English and Scottish, Jewish and French literati met in the Kyrgyz capital to discuss ways of bringing Central Asia's best literature onto a world literary stage.

Prior to the festival the organisers ran a literary competition, choosing the best of the best in three categories: fiction, literary translation, and book illustration.

Bishkek in November

Since I was in Bishkek I spent my weekend taking part in the event. Reflecting upon it now I would like to discuss a couple of points which might be of interest to you too.

First of all, the notion of a "world literary scene". Somehow we assume that there is one and that it is connected to English as a global language.

The assumption is that unless you are published in English you are not part of world literature.

The status of "world literature" may be given to French and, to a lesser extent, Spanish works, but it seems that no other languages - including Chinese and Arabic - are considered to hold the same rights.

In fact literature is created and lives its life in every language in which it is written.

And in fact world literature is the sum of all those unknown and unheard works in Georgian and Swahili, Chuvash and Tonga, as well as Italian and Indonesian, Swedish and Gujarati and many many other languages.

Yes, English has assumed the role of the truly global language, but it doesn't mean that the entire world's literature must be judged through English translations.

For instance I met in Bishkek a Polish writer, Jan Vishnevsky, who published his first book Loneliness on the Net in his late 40s, turning himself from a computer scientist into a bestselling author both in Poland and Russia. He sold millions of books in Eastern Europe, but hardly anyone knows him in the West, because he hasn't been translated into a Western language.

Hundreds of his most devoted fans were swirling around him in Bishkek, but to my shame I had never heard of him before the festival.

There's another problem - the problem of "big literatures". Even the books which are translated into English never top of the bestsellers lists - English-language readers would prefer to read English-language authors. There was a joke in the former Soviet Union on the famous Armenian Radio network. A question: "Could a general's sons become field marshals?" - "No way!" - "Why?" - "Because the field marshal has got his own sons"... It's the same way with translated literature.

But even within translated literature there's a kind of "quota for representativeness" - a priority list for bigger nations and ethnicities.

I'm pretty sure that a translated Chinese or Indian writer has a much greater chance of being noticed by reviewers and peers than, let's say, a Latvian or Nepalese writer.

I used to have a friend in Georgia - one of the greatest writers and poets I ever met - whose name was Otar Chiladze.

Just because he was from a small country which never made it into the headlines, Otar Chiladze with all his mighty talent never came to international prominence.

He died several years ago. One English friend of mine who also knew and loved him, said bitterly to me that Otar was maybe the most "Nobelable" of all the writers of his generation.

I'm not so bitter though, his literature lives on in Georgian and in my mind that's a big enough contribution to "world literature".

Communist-speak

2012-11-22T14:23:22Z

Last time we discussed the Communist Congress as a ritual, so I thought this time we could deconstruct Communist-speak.

I'm not a specialist in Chinese, but I know that the very title of the Communist Party in Chinese is food for thought. Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng apparently translates as "party of common prosperity" rather than "communist party".

However I'll leave off the Chinese and stick to what I know best - Russian or Soviet-communist speak.

What are my credentials to discuss this? In one of my books - called A Speechwriter - I told a story about the time I was present at a conference where every speech had been written by me.

The first thing to say is that Soviet communist-speak was quite far removed from normal speech.

There was a joke about a communist who, when asked "How many languages do you speak?" replied, "Russian, Communist and Administrative-Cursing Languages".

Secondly, it was different from ordinary language, not just through the usage of communist terms like Leninist, party, scientific communism, rotting bourgeois-capitalist etc. - but also through overcomplicated syntax and structure. Words would negate one another, so that people would be made to clamber along great strings of highly ideological phrases to get to the end of a sentence, but when they got there they would be none the wiser as to the meaning of any of it.

Any hint of everyday sense to be found in epic reports and speeches extending across many hours would be taken by the general public back to their private kitchens and mulled over again and again, spawning a multitude of guesses and assumptions.

'Reading between the lines' was the most popular phrase back then.

Since the entire communist ideology was in fact a type of religion it also inherited the religious linguistic legacy.

The most striking example in communist-speak is the phenomenon of what you might call "double gerundisation", which came from Church liturgical language. For instance, in the language of sermons the word "glory" would become more solemn if it was made into "glorifying" rather than "glorification".

Communists would take any good, practical word and do the same with it: "speed" would turn into "speedifying" and then into "speedification".
Though at first glance this seems like innocent linguistic play, in fact it goes much deeper.

Having failed to achieve a change in reality (remember the famous Marxist thesis: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it"), they decided to effect a change through words.

In those "double-gerundial" nouns there is always a verbal element, the element of action.

For instance the word "better" always requires the act - "to make" or "making", i.e. "to make better". Communist-speak invented the word "betterisation" which doesn't require the act of "making", but magically takes you straight to the result.

One could write dissertations on these twists and turns in Communist-speak, but I would like to end this piece by quoting a predecessor at the BBC, George Orwell, from his novel 1984:

"'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

George Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC during World War II

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.'"

And:

"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

The Party Congress as a ritual

2012-11-15T12:21:09Z

China's ruling Communist Party has held an important congress with sweeping leadership changes.

More than 2,200 delegates from across China gathered in Beijing's Great Hall of the People and selected a new Central Committee, which in its own turn elected China's top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee.

The congress was a well-choreographed display of power and unity, though the proceedings, as many observers have noticed, mostly took place behind closed doors.

The choreography of it made me think about the ritualistic nature of events like party congresses, which I have witnessed personally in the former Soviet Union.

Inside the Great Hall of the People during the closing ceremony of the 2012 Party Congress

First of all let's think about the way things look - a grand hall where thousands of party members are seated row upon row like the congregation of a cathedral during the mass or liturgy.

But in place of the altar they see the body of the party leadership - the Central Committee. They are placed above them on a high podium with altar decorations - flowers in front and a communist coat of arms behind.

Just as an archbishop has his ambo, the general secretary or party chairman has his rostrum from which to deliver his speech, his sermon.

The process contains several archetypical moments which key into the most ancient parts of the public's unconsciousness.

I have looked up at this as a member of the public, and looked down from it as a part of the presidium.

When you are sitting amongst the ordinary members (I wanted to say 'in the crowd' but it's not a crowd since everyone is ordered and well-behaved) you are faceless, just one of many, as opposed to the selected ones on stage.

Those people on stage might look the same as you, they might well be wearing the same uniform as you, but they are definitely 'first among equals'. Seeing your mirror image sitting amongst the 'selected and elected' brings on a surge of hope and fear. The hope relates to the future - one day it may be possible to become like them. The fear relates to your current vulnerability, when any of those 'chosen' could snuff you out with a wag of his finger.

But when you are sitting up in the presidium, you are just as keenly aware of the distance separating you from the row upon row of 'members, who are really 'extras' to the process unfolding within the hall. You might share a joke with someone sitting next to you about a member of the congregation who looks odd, or someone else who is snoring away...

And yet the same two feelings torment you up in the presidium, only in reverse order - fear and hope. The fear is that you will lose this privilege and the hope is that it won't happen to you.

Looking at the layout of the Great Hall, it's clear that communist ideology has taken Hegelian dialectics, turned them upside down, and sewn them into its fundamental principles.

The first of these dialectical laws concerns the unity and conflict of opposites. The main body of the hall and the presidium are one, but they are opposites. The difference between them also subliminally alludes to the eternal 'class struggle' stated in the Communist Manifesto.

The second law refers to the inevitable transformation from the quantitative into the qualitative. Going from being a member of the party's body to becoming one of the 'selected and elected' requires lots of quantitative efforts which ultimately turn into a qualitative change.

"Sorry is the soldier who doesn't dream of becoming Napoleon" goes one of the most famous communist proverbs.

Marx himself said: "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits." Replace the word "science" with "power" and you'll grasp what I'm talking about.

The third and final of the rules is the negation of the negation.

Nobody in the Great Hall would admit what I am saying here, but we can use this rule to negate their negation and show how ritualistic these congresses are and deconstruct how they appeal to the most profound human feelings.

What are we afraid of?

2012-11-09T14:50:48Z

Kids are afraid of darkness because it can't contain their imaginations.

The same phenomenon happens in our social lives, when we look at the things which are unfamiliar to us.

One example is the perception of Islam by an average person in the West: Islam appears to him or her as darkness does to a kid - a frightening monolith.

It is not easy for one person to represent a religion as huge and diverse as Islam

In fact this isn't just the perception of normal people - even at universities or on television channels you often see a so-called Muslim writer or expert, whose task is to present the whole of Islam to a challenging public.

I myself have been in this situation many times, talking on behalf of the whole of Islam (more than a billion people of different ages, genders, races, ethnicities) - trying to encapsulate all those people from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, from Tatarstan to Nigeria.

You could never imagine a Christian writer who would dare to present the whole of Christianity to any audience, but it often happens to Muslims.

When one sees Islam on the inside it's as diverse as any human creed or deed: dozens of schools, hundreds of branches, thousands of views and interpretations, millions of local rituals and traditions...

Let's take the most topical news of the week - the US Presidential elections. Some of the Muslims of Central Asia I've been in touch with argue that Barack Obama suits them much better than Mitt Romney, because as they argue "he has got a touch of Muslim blood".

Others say that he had a chance to mend the relationship between the US and the Islamic world, but not only did he miss the chance, he worsened the whole relationship.

A third group would argue that usually Republicans are much stricter with local autocrats and therefore if Romney had come to power the US would pay more attention to human rights in Central Asia.

There is also a view that neither of them would or will help the cause of ordinary people in Central Asia, that the US President will always act for the benefit of America first and foremost, and the interests of Americans have nothing in common with the interests of local people.

As you see, there is a variety of views on this single issue.

A Sufi parable comes to my mind.

A lover knocked at the door of his beloved.
"Who is it?" she replied.
The lover replied, "It is I."
"Go away. This house will not hold you and I."
The rejected lover retreated into the wilderness. For a long time he prayed and meditated on the beloved's words. Finally he returned and knocked at the door again.
"Who is it?" she said again.
The lover replied, "It is you."
Immediately, the door opened.

So until we learn to see the other, the darkness in front of us will be always frightening.

Crossing borders

2012-10-31T16:08:32Z

Those of my readers who follow me on my BBC Twitter or Facebook accounts might know that I have been busy launching my book A Poet and Bin-Laden, about an Uzbek poet who ended his life among the Taliban.

As some people have remarked, the novel brings together many voices, strands and genres. In a way it's a cross-border narrative experiment, involving poetry, journalism and prose. So I have decided to give you a glimpse of it here with a small chapter about crossing borders - though not figurative, but real ones.

Do you know what it's like crossing the border between two states? Not borders like those between European countries, when you drive along in a car and suddenly find yourself in a different country, but the Tajik-Afghan border, which is guarded by Russian border guards. Where they shoot without warning, and not into the air, but to bring you down.

Close to the Afghanistan - Tajikistan border

I have been told of so many ways to cross, from bribing the border guards, especially those of Tajik nationality - the method that the "commanders" mostly used when they didn't cross by air in a state helicopter - to an armed skirmish, when a group of marksmen draws the border guards' fire and the spies take advantage of the shooting to crawl or swim across while the darkness is split by the bright tracery work of flying bullets.

But Yosir and his experienced partner Jafar made their way to Afghanistan entirely at their own risk. First they were taken as far as Tavildara, then they travelled on donkeys through gorges as far as the border zone, and early in the night they dressed warmly and set off into the mountains, which Jafar knew like the back of his own hand, a hand that had only four fingers, since the index finger had been shot off in one of the fire fights there. And although he always regarded the novices whom he had to get across to the other side as a burden, the process of crossing the border and exercising his professional skill gave him a measure of enjoyment and satisfaction that actually meant more to him than the hundred or two hundred dollars that he was paid for this operation. He usually trained his wards briefly, and after that relied on unquestioning obedience and blind imitation of what he did himself.

And indeed, what else could they do? They might be strong and healthy, but they were soft, and they pressed their clumsy bodies down hard into every tussock of grass, constantly expecting to be riddled with bullets, or to be swept away by the clear, icy water of a stream.

Now here he was, supposedly on his way to Afghanistan, but actually in search of his own death. And so, in the cold, thickening darkness of the night, while they waited for the most difficult time for the border guards, which is not around midnight, but in the small hours just before dawn, the motionless outline of his body jutted far out from the recess in the cliff, annoying Jafar and yet at the same time reassuring him. He had seen all kinds of "mujahedin": some quite shamelessly messed their pants, or broke out in such a sweat in the cold mountain night that the snow around them started to melt, threatening a landslip, while others tried to drag him back, promising twice as much money as he had been paid for the crossing. But this one just sat there as if he was frozen to the rock and didn't say a word ...

In the mountains time flows across the sky: the candle-end of the moon is suddenly exposed and slips through the wet cotton wool of a dirty cloud, and then the clouds themselves start to stir, and engulf the moon so that it barely visible: the sky is the only thing here that is occasionally restless and fidgety, if you don't count ordinary people, that is. People only rarely appear here at night, but those who do can notice how, at such rare moments, time leaps down to the earth - into the water that is suddenly lit up, into the ice that reflects the moon in a harsh glint, into the eyes gaping around in fright ...

There is every sort of animal in a man: a snake, creeping noiselessly towards a rustling river; a cat, gently stealing along after it; a muskrat, swimming with only its head exposed, but above all inside a man there is the man himself - fearful of every murmur of the earth and, above all, of another man who has sharpened a knife for him, or aimed a sniper's rifle at him. And yet there is a state in which you call this danger down on yourself: you stop and you wait. And at that moment you realise that the feeling of every danger is connected with a movement: the movement of a snake, a cat, a muskrat ...

And that was the way Yosir stood upright there on the bank of the Pyanja, like a ground squirrel readying himself to give a sudden whistle, but instead of getting a knife in the back or a bullet from behind, he was felled bodily by Jafar. Jafar hissed something as he did it, but no louder than the water streaming off his clothes, and he dragged the senseless Yosir across the rough, sharp earth ...

Best,

Hamid

Picassos found in Tashkent

2012-10-26T10:26:03Z

People say that God moves in mysterious ways. I often apply this saying to the phenomenon of artworks living their independent and sometimes incredible lives quite separately from their creators.

If you were told that the Tashkent State Museum of Arts was running its own exhibition of Picasso ceramics, you wouldn't believe it, would you?

But this is indeed the case. Twelve world-class pieces from the famous artist have been released from the vaults of the museum for the first time in 40 years.

Until now nobody was aware of the existence of these masterpieces in the cellars of the museum, apart from one or two museum workers.

During and after World War II, Tashkent was somewhere the Russian and the Soviet cultural elite took refuge. Celebrities like the great poet Anna Akhmatova, writer Aleksey Tolstoy, artists and composers, countless counts and barons, coming back from the Stalinist camps or from abroad, were gathered in Tashkent - a safe, warm and prosperous oriental city.

They brought their collections and artefacts along with them too. When I was living in Tashkent I used to hear from time to time that someone was selling a Stradivarius violin, or the ivory chess set which had been used in a famous pre-war film about the lives of emperors, and so on...

But the story of Picasso's ceramics in Tashkent State Museum of Arts is a different one.

One of Picasso's closest friends, Fernand Léger, was married to a Ukrainian lady, whose name was Nadia.

Fernand and Nadia had a good collection of Picassos. When Fernand Léger died in 1955 this collection was inherited by Nadia, who decided to pass it onto the Soviet Museums.

By a Soviet system of dividends, or by some other historical accident, 12 pieces of ceramic art by Picasso found themselves in Uzbekistan - a country famous for its own ceramics.

Apparently the works were exhibited in the early sixties in Tashkent, but after exhibition everything was tucked away, and everyone somehow forgot about their existence.

Until...

Until one of the museum workers rediscovered them in 2004, by which time the Soviet Union was not around to claim the pieces back...

Uzbekistan is famous for its collections of avant-garde art. I wrote recently about the Savitsky Museum in Nukus, Karakalpakstan.

This week, 12 families of Italian tourists made their way from Italy to Nukus in their campervans to see that rare collection.

I'm sure that if they come to hear about the Picassos of Tashkent they will continue their journey along the new Silk Road...

Should poetry be forced onto the curriculum?

2012-10-17T15:44:28Z

Let's continue our literary discussion.

After the week when the biggest award in the literary world - the Nobel Prize for literature - was given to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, it's more than appropriate to talk about some problems in literature.

Last week I took part in the Liege Biennale of poets, which this year ran under the title: Should poetry be always modern?

Mo Yan's career spans thirty years and takes in dozens of works

Two round-tables in particular drew my attention: How to Transmit Poetry? and Problems of Publishing Poetry.

As regards the first round-table, there is a near-universal concern among poets that poetry is disappearing from the school curriculum, that nobody - but especially the younger generation - is interested in poetry anymore, and that one should act immediately to save poetry from its death.
There must be serious reasons for these concerns.

But at the same time I'm sure that people were saying this 10, 20, 30 years or even - dare I say - centuries ago.

Those hundred-plus poets who were discussing the miserable state of poetry today were in fact denying that premise by their very own existence.

They came from different generations, including the youngest - the generation of poetry slams and rap.

Over the years I have noticed a tendency for previous generations to set up their own standard and vision for poetry. Anything beyond that vision is simply disregarded as "non-poetry" or "rubbish-poetry".

Beat poetry of the fifties and sixties was at odds with the generation of wartime poets, slam doesn't chime well with representatives of beat poetry, etc...

You want my opinion? I think that poetry finds its own way - all we can do is to make it widely available to anyone in any form, however people might need it.

In that way people who are interested in classic sonnets won't be fighting the rappers, the purveyors of slam-poetry won't be despising the vers-librists for the absence of rhymes, etc...

I have also noticed that Western poets (French, English, American, etc..) are sometimes envious of the fame of poets from traditional societies, where they are seen as semi-prophets and have a great following.

Very often this fact is taken as proof of the miserable state of poetry in the West.

In my last entry I discussed the opposition between information-based societies and emotion-based ones.
But even if we leave this argument to one side, those jealous poets don't see that, in proportion to its population, France has more poets or people who consider themselves poets than any of those poetry-driven traditional societies.

It's true though that while almost everyone writes poetry, almost no-one reads it. As that famous joke goes, 'I'm not a reader, I'm a writer!'

One of the poets at the Liege Biennale, John Glenday from Scotland, read a poem called Tin about the fact that the can-opener was invented forty-eight years after the tin can.

Let's hope that poetry works in a similarly mysterious way.

When you asked me for a love poem,
(another love poem) my thoughts
were immediately drawn to the early days
of the food canning industry -
all those strangely familiar trade-names from childhood:
Del Monte, Green Giant, Fray Bentos, Heinz.
I thought of Franklin and his poisoned men
drifting quietly northwest by north
towards the scooped shale of their graves
and I thought of the first tin of cling peaches
glowing on a dusty pantry shelf
like yet-to-be-discovered radium -
the very first tin of cling peaches
in the world, and for half a century
my fingers reaching out to it.